(Washington, DC) Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA 4^th )
has introduced legislation calling for a re-opening of the
investigations of the 1970's by the United States Select
Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to
Intelligence Activities chaired by Senator Frank Church
which led to startling revelations concerning federal, state
and local intelligence and law enforcement agency violations
of Constitutional rights of privacy, limits on search and
seizure, surveillance, wiretapping and disruption of dissent
and protected activities, and massive collection of dossiers
by FBI, CIA, NSA, Pentagon, Defense Intelligence Agencies
and other local agencies, targeting the civil rights, Native
American and anti-war movements of the period and
"neutralizing" their leadership and discrediting the efforts
for social change over decades.

The most infamous of these
abuses was the FBI's COINTELPRO operations, or counter
intelligence program, and victims of those attacks remain
wrongfully imprisoned to this day. CHAOS, GARDEN PLOT, CABLE
SPLICER, LANTERN SPIKE, REX 84 and other programs were
carried out by agencies ranging from the CIA to FEMA,
including planning for massive arrests and martial law,
suspending the Constitution. New laws countered many of
these excesses and abuses following from the Church
Committee revelations, but not all. Surveillance and
disruption, as well as planning and exercises for detention
and suspension of civil liberties continued through the
1980s and 1990s against legal domestic organizations
supporting democratic movements abroad.

Following the
attacks on September 11, 2001, there were immediate calls to
renew COINTELPRO-style surveillance, go to Continuity of
Government, release intelligence agencies from the
restrictions of the Church Committee era laws (which
included the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act Court to pre-approve Presidential
surveillance programs), calls to end the principle of Posse
Comitatus, which separates police and military functions,
and renewed surveillance and disruption by the Pentagon's
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI), Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Transportation
Security Agency (TSA), Director of National Intelligence
(DNI) and by certain provisions of the USA PATRIOT ACT and
related.

House Resolution 1056, introduced on September
21, provides for release of all undisclosed government files
on similar past and present abuses which do not compromise
an existing intelligence, agent, source or method, for
judicial relief for the past victims of COINTELPRO and other
programs, and for the re-opening of Congressional hearings
into the historical abuses as well as the current renewal
and expansion of similar programs that violate human, civil
and Constitutional rights. The bill has been referred to
both House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees.

"We
still to this day do not know the full scope of the abusive
surveillance, targeting, discrediting and disruptive tactics
and plans of the past," said Representative McKinney, "and a
look back the Nixon era Tom Charles Houston plan, referred
to as Œfascist' by Congressional investigators, shows us it
is being implemented in full since 9/11. Congress has a
responsibility to open oversight hearings into the new
abuses as well as their historical context, and to
acknowledge and give relief to its victims then and
now."

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